First post, by 386_junkie
- Rank
- Oldbie
This is going to be a three part thread to test and bench the three Blue Lightning systems I have built / building. The three systems comprise of; - third party’s Alaris Couger, IBM’s PS/1 1000, and a modified PS/2 8580. This first part thread will focus on Alaris’ Couger.
Now, it has been a few months since I bought this board and with the mountain of ongoing projects… it has taken until now to put something together and give it a decent test / bench. A couple of changes were made during testing (mainly cache) with the board again benched to reflect the changes.
The specs; -
Motherboard: Alaris Cougar
Chipset: Opti 82C499
Cache: 256k (20ns) / 512k (15ns)
Memory; 8MB (70ns) Proprietary Compaq / IBM
CPU: IBM 486DLC3 a.k.a BL3
FPU: No
The board
BL2 - 75.2 MHz / BL3 - 99.7 MHz
BL2 / BL3 (256k cache)
Cachechk
These results were obtained with 20ns 256K (32K x 😎 cache plugged into the board, though I was curious to see if there was any difference by larger and / or faster cache in tandem with the triple clocking of Blue Lightning, so I changed out the (32K x 😎’s and plugged in (128K x 😎’s to have 15ns 512K cache.
BL2 / BL3 (512k cache)
There was not a great deal of difference which I was half expecting. In fact it had even crossed my mind that the added cache may slow things down a little as I’d seen in other systems… but maintaining performance is a win in itself. As a side note; by the time I’d sourced 512k cache, the STB was already packed away… so the closer to hand DS64 was used. You can see the difference in memory timings, STB throughput around two and a half times that of the DS64!
Overall and in practice, there is a definite and noticeable change in system performance between the double and triple clocking of the CPU. Speedsys seems to mark BL3 as beating a DX2/50, and even comparing it to a DX2/66. I can’t yet agree with this as I’ll probably need to do more testing… especially on the practical side i.e. comparing and seeing how programs run… but for now, it is certainly not beating around no bush.
